Toronto/CMEDIA: A confidential settlement reportedly over a cancelled Starlink contract was made between Ontario’s premier Doug Ford and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
A $100-million was considered by the province “significantly less than the contract value,” and the amount paid out was part of a negotiated settlement and could not be released, said Ford’s office.
“I believe that was the right decision, protecting Canadians, not supporting a U.S.-led owner that was pretty aggressive towards Canada,” he said on Tuesday.
SpaceX refused to respond to a request for comment.
Following US President Donald Trump’s winning the 2024 election, Infrastructure Minister Kinga Surma announced the deal with SpaceX to deliver high-speed internet to 15,000 households and businesses in northern and rural Ontario.
Ford posted about the deal on X, the social media platform owned by Musk, who responded with “cool.”
Musk went to great lengths to support Trump’s presidential bid.
The Ontario government considered November 2024’s Starlink deal as a positive move designed to appease Trump’s inner circle. At the time, Ford supported Trump.
During Ontario’s snap election that Doug called for February 2025, Doug said that he was initially happy Trump won the presidential election but became annoyed due to Trump’s threats to annex Canada through “economic” force.
Some anonymous sources in Ontario said the Starlink system had proven its technology after a trial run in Pikangikum First Nation in 2020, and was the only one that could be operational within months of signing the deal.
SpaceX won the competitive bid, the province said at the time, and planned to be operational by June 2025.
The program – dubbed ONSAT, which stands for Ontario Satellite Internet – would have covered equipment and installation costs and would also guarantee internet coverage priority over the average paying Starlink customer.
Remote First Nations in northern Ontario were set to benefit the most from the deal.
First Nations and mining exploration companies across northern Ontario are now using Starlink on their own dime to connect to the grid.
Remote First Nations in northern Ontario and vast parts of rural Ontario are being laid with fibre-optic cable by the province.
Both the Starlink deal and the broadband project were part of the province’s $4-billion plan to deliver high-speed internet to every corner of Ontario.
Ford’s office said they “are identifying a suitable alternative partner.”
“We should have been looking at a Canadian company like Telesat that was doing the same work and that would have protected jobs here in Ontario, but the premier wasn’t thinking about it at the time,” Liberal parliamentary Leader John Fraser said.
“It blew up in his face and now we’re all paying the price. Just tell us how much we gave over to this billionaire.”
SpaceX won the competitive bid, the province said at the time, and planned to be operational by June 2025.
Once Trump brought Musk closer into his orbit after inauguration, the billionaire who has Canadian citizenship through his Regina-born mother began mimicking the president’s verbal attacks on Canada.
“Canada is not a real country,” Musk wrote on X in February 2025. (Musk and Trump have had a rocky relationship over the last year).
After Trump launched his tariff war against Canada in March 2025, Ford responded with a series of retaliatory measures.
